TSMC and German Government Negotiate Subsidies for Proposed Chip Factory - Wants 50% subsidized

The world is going subsidised mad. I wonder when it will stop.

 

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Let me fill u in a secret. It has always been this way.....

Subsidizing the elderly (retirement) is "too big of a expenditure" but subsidizing a billion dollar corp so their profit margin doesn't drop... perfectly acceptable.
(And no, the "but it generates jobs" argument is moot once you realize the amount of subsidized money could have paid for such jobs for 50 years....)
Intel got 4 billion from Germany and wants another 2 cuz "inflation" and "increased costs". They also got some billions from the US....

 

The more essential you are, the more leverage you have. Especially if the world is worried about losing supply due to threatened invasion by China

 

This.
As chip manufacturing is critical for basically... everything, and Covid has shown that exporting structural and strategic manufacturing elsewhere is not as good as an idea as big companies and governments thought, then countries are starting to try to re-implement at least some of them, and bringing back the know-how, which has been basically almost completely lost in Europe.

 

Back in the days, many people called these freeloader commie scum but its just normal for business. Unless you ask for handouts to feed, clothe and shelter people in need, then you are commie scum.

 

They are basically playing the fear of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to get half of their costs paid, and giving back non of the profits, as usual.

 

So, were is my subsidy???


My upgrade wasn`t cheap...

 

This kind of corporate welfare needs to end, even if it creates 1000s or 10's of thousands of jobs what is the actual pay back period for the tax dollars given? I very much doubt they'll make that money back during the life of the facility especially when inflation is taken into account....
It's like Canada now giving 10billion to Volkswagen, why???

 

The paybacks are mostly not in the form of literally being investments and being revenue positive in dollars, its moreso about keeping industries, keeping manufacturing, etc, in the country giving the subsidies. For chips, every country now understands that having the world's most critical fabs in Taiwan is not sustainable and that they need to have significant domestic capabilities. This is why you're seeing big subsidies for chip manufacturing now.

 

It's not nearly that bad. Europeans have been designing chips all the time, for example Arm is European, even if the British wish they weren't Europeans. Ireland has Intel fabs. Automotive chip manufacturing is decently strong in Europe as it is. Plenty of European electronics companies know how to design chips even if they have been mostly made in Asia so far. But yeah, ideally things should be a lot better for Europe. Let's hope they will get better and the new money doesn't merely disappear into better pockets.

 

Don`t forget ASML!